Safe

Synopsis

"Safe" has been described as a horror movie of the soul, a description that director Todd Haynes relishes. California housewife Carol White seems to have it all in life: a wealthy husband, a beautiful house, servants, beauty, and a lot of friends. The only thing she lacks is a strong personality: Carol seems timid and empty during all of her interactions with the world around her. At the beginning of the film, one would consider her to be more safe in life than just about anyone. That doesn't turn out to be the case. Starting with headaches and leading to a grandmal seizure, Carol becomes more and more sick, claiming that she's become sensitive to the common toxins in today's world: exhaust, fumes, aerosol spray, etc. She pulls back from the sexual advances of her husband and spends her nights alone by the TV or wandering around the outside of her well-protected home like an animal in a cage. Her physician examines her and can find nothing wrong. An allergist finds that she has an ...

"Safe" has been described as a horror movie of the soul, a description that director Todd Haynes relishes. California housewife Carol White seems to have it all in life: a wealthy husband, a beautiful house, servants, beauty, and a lot of friends. The only thing she lacks is a strong personality: Carol seems timid and empty during all of her interactions with the world around her. At the beginning of the film, one would consider her to be more safe in life than just about anyone. That doesn't turn out to be the case. Starting with headaches and leading to a grandmal seizure, Carol becomes more and more sick, claiming that she's become sensitive to the common toxins in today's world: exhaust, fumes, aerosol spray, etc. She pulls back from the sexual advances of her husband and spends her nights alone by the TV or wandering around the outside of her well-protected home like an animal in a cage. Her physician examines her and can find nothing wrong. An allergist finds that she has an ...

Tech specs

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by poppyredflux 9 / 10

My Kind of Thriller!

Not for all tastes, but a superb movie, without doubt. The direction is
austere and the character is almost too shallow to care about, but the
brilliance of the script and the film as a whole is that it doesn't
instruct
the viewer what to think, but presents plenty of material to think about.
The ending is subtly devastating. Also, the movie contains two or three
of
the most striking, haunting images I've seen in the past half decade in
film.

Someone else compared it to "Dead Ringers", and this is apt in many ways,
though the subject matter is less perverse. "Safe" shares a similar
aesthetic both in the distance the director takes from the narrative and
some matters of style.

Recommended for the daring.

Reviewed by mandy-23 10 / 10

brilliant depiction of suburbia and the new age movement

This is my very favorite movie, one of the scariest I've ever seen. The alienation and isolation of the suburbs come across beautifully in this film. Car culture and sprawl definitely contribute to the empty feeling one receives from following this story of a rich suburban housewife's allergic reaction to her vapid life. The mood and statement of the film are epitomized by the scene in which Carol is driving alone on the freeway, going into convulsions from "the fumes", all while the scratchy radio produces mundane religious babble. Ironically, she pulls off the road and is "saved" by the confines of a parking garage. How appropriate based upon the pigheaded tendency for urban planners to say, "Boy, this traffic is horrible, what do we do about it? I know! We'll build more parking garages!" The scratchy babble of religious radio in the scene indicates the hypocritical irrelevance of spirituality when it exists as part of a alienated consumer-driven, environmentally-destructive society. Religion, particularly the new-age movement seems to parallel the suburbs in its pretty blandness and emergence as a way for capitalists to try to redeem their souls/family life after destroying society (eg the inner city). New age and suburbia combine when Carol goes to Wrenwood (a place even more sterile and removed from reality than Carol's suburb), a healing retreat for people with environmental illness. Despite a lot of fluffy, positive talk on behalf of an AIDS victim guru, Carol's physical and spiritual condition only decline at Wrenwood--she becomes more and more like Lester, the faceless guy in the white suit (the perfect new age suburbanite) who is afraid of everything and is expected to die based on that fear.